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WAGES OF PROGRESS? Eight-year-old Chinese girl contracts lung cancer due to air pollution

Industrial
superiority and progress comes at a very heavy price. China has become a
powerhouse of Asian industry, but in so doing has left many of its
people stricken and suffering. Now, an eight-year-old girl in mainland
China has been diagnosed with lung cancer - the direct result of air
pollution, experts say.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Her illness blamed directly on environment factors, the girl, from Jiangsu lived by a busy road where she inhaled all kinds of dust and particles. These particles included superfine PM2.5 particles, less than 2.5 microns wide, which are considered the most dangerous component of polluted air.

China's hellbent plunge towards urbanization and industrialization has created some of the world's worst urban pollution. The byproducts of such progress are now being blamed for soaring rates of cancer and respiratory diseases.

In the capital of Beijing, which has some of the nation's very worst polluted conditions, deaths from lung cancer have risen by a substantial 56 percent from 2001 to 2010. A fifth of all cancer patients here suffer lung cancer, becoming the leading cause of cancer deaths among men in the capital and the second-biggest among women -- after breast cancer, in 2010.

The World Health Organisation's "2010 Global Burden of Disease" study has found that air pollution accounted for 1.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2010. These include 140,000 deaths from lung cancer alone. Lung cancer is by far the most common cancer in Asia.

China had about 20 percent of the world's recently diagnosed cancer patients, and that cancers of the lung, liver, stomach, oesophagus, colon, cervix, breast and nasopharynx were responsible for 80 percent of cancer deaths in the country.

The central government in China last month announced plans to start listing its top ten most air-polluted cities every month in the hope that national humiliation will push positive environmental action.

"We must put air quality control as an ecological red line for economic management and social development," China's Vice Premier Zhang Gao Li said in a statement as he announced the new policy at the 18th Air Pollution Control Conference in Beijing.